Dem to co-sponsor bill blocking EPA

House Republicans can claim "bipartisanship" in their bid to handcuff the EPA's climate change rules.

Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) told POLITICO on Wednesday that he will be co-sponsoring the legislation from House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) that puts a freeze on EPA's regulatory agenda for major industrial polluters like power plants and petroleum refiners.

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"The EPA needs to be reined in," said Peterson, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee and a frequent critic of the agency.

Upton and Whitfield, the chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee, have been offering small changes to their bill in their courtship of moderate and conservative Democrats like Peterson. Support from House Democrats, they hope, will put pressure on Senate Democrats and the Obama White House to accept their legislation.

"We want to get as many as we can, and we have reason to believe we'll have a number of Democrats," Whitfield told reporters.

House GOP aides were still trying to put a full list together of House Democratic co-sponsors as of late Wednesday and couldn't confirm additional names. But the field of potential Democrats numbers around 13, considering the list of lawmakers who crossed the aisle during last month's floor vote on anti-EPA language attached to the fiscal 2011 spending bill.

Peterson insisted that his support for the Upton-Whitfield bill didn't come with any caveats, though he said Republicans have told him the legislation won't mess with existing EPA programs like the renewable fuel standard.

"The discussion we had with them, whatever they're doing on the greenhouse gases, I got an assurance it would not be detrimental to ethanol," Peterson said.